Las Huelgas Manuscript (14th century) / Sufi Chant / Creation
6 female singers and organetto
Guest artist: Alia Sellami, vocals

This programme bears the echo of thebaids in different places, religions, languages and eras.
A tribute to feminine spirituality, it is the fruit gathered from our own deserts, where we share a taste for questioning, doubt and wonder. Symbolic of a chosen, intimate solitude, or a real, physical desert, these two spaces are consonant in their immensity. Medieval music, poetry and contemporary music invite us to explore them.
The desert of Thebes was the refuge of the first Christians, and since then the name Thebaid has been applied to any place, even a symbolic one, where people isolate themselves to lead a life of asceticism and prayer, where they “empty” themselves of the world to achieve a second birth. Evocative of withdrawal and trial, but also a place of revelation, the desert links the three monotheistic religions.
In the Middle Ages, in the West, the desert referred to the hermitage, forest, islands, monasteries—A metaphor for a solitary life in which people come to contemplate ‘invisible realities’, pray and sing. Among the Sufis, Khalwa describes both the action of isolating oneself and the place where one isolates oneself: nature, the desert, the cave, the cell. It is a path to knowledge through ‘enlightenment and spiritual openness’. The use of song, the breath embodied in sound, has always been associated with worship as a means of meditation, prayer and ecstasy.
In the Christian Middle Ages, we turn to the manuscript of Las Huelgas, a women’s monastery founded in the twelfth century in Spain, a land where East and West converged for centuries.
The deserts of the East are evoked by the voice of Alia Sellami singing Sufi songs handed down orally from generation to generation.
Today’s thebaids are present with a contemporary piece, Khalwa, by Alia Sellami, as well as improvisations.

> Released in May 2024 – Bayard Musique

Two possible casting options:

5 singers and organetto.

5 singers and organetto, with Jean Boucault and Johnny Rasse – Les Chanteurs-Oiseaux (The Birdsong imitators).

Works by Borlet, Solage, Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, Clément Janequin together with pieces of unknown origin from the 14^th century Chantilly Codex.

Angels, rare birds, and other more familiar warblers appear throughout the programme. The entire history of music is filled with their songs. A bird is a poet, a prophet, and a singer:  the miraculous alliance of art with nature.

In the Middle Ages, human song was regarded as an emulation of birdsong which itself was nothing less than the earthly echo of the angels. An alluring ancestry in which trills vied with sounds from deeper in the throat.

Drôles d’oiseaux (Odd Birds) is a fine tribute to our feathered friends that is both enchanting and poetic as well as a tad mischievous. A concert in which virtuosity and grace become one.

For our added pleasure, the concert can be supplemented with the inclusion of those two renowned birdsong imitators, Jean Boucault and Johnny Rasse (www.chanteurs-oiseaux.com).

This programme can be performed outdoors, which offers the birds in the garden a chance to join in the concert!

A NEW PRODUCTION FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES

3 actress-singers, 1 musician and 1 stage manager.

A musical tale for the stage with vocals, instruments, masks and puppets.

Featuring works by Guillaume de Machaut and Moniot d’Arras, and pieces of unknown origin from the 13th century; with Caroline Marçot. Script by Anouch Paré.

Director: Véronique Samakh. Lighting design: Simon Fritschi.

Costumes: Maxence Rapetti. Scenography: Ludovic Meunier.

For all audiences aged 6 and above. Running time 45-50 minutes.

Mahaut, fille de bois, is a magical performance set in an imaginary Middle Ages as richly detailed as the illuminating illustrations of a medieval manuscript. It is carried along by specialists of medieval music, all of whom share the desire to combine the highest artistic standards whilst facilitating easy and immediate access.

According to an old legend, a long time ago, fairies stole babies from their cribs and replaced them with plain pieces of wood. After expending considerable love and affection, the wood comes to life… and so begins the story of Mahaut, our heroine. As in many tales, there is a spiritual journey of initiation, interspersed with exciting adventures and colourful characters, during which, laughter, irreverence, and poetry combine with music to question identity, legitimacy, lineage, kinship and love. Along the way, we will encounter Casserole the nanny, Fae des Houles, a griffin, the Mad Knight, a number of gargoyles, la Dame ofde Ventremort and many more.

The production is designed to be mobile with an adaptable format, for a maximum capacity of 200 people.

A coproduction of the Compagnie du Carrosse d’or (93), the Théâtre du château d’Eu (76), the Quai des Arts (61), the DOC (14), and l’Arsenal (27)

13th century motets of unknown origin, John Cage, Jacques Rebotier, Ghérasim Luca.

5 female singers
1 actress-singer

The “natural music” of the word forms the basic raw material for this programme, which places the emphasis on humour and dramatic quality. The poems of Ghérasim Luca, who weaves words to the point of absurdity, forge a comical and metaphysical bond throughout the concert. All the pieces in the programme smack of playfulness and fun. Often surprising and whimsical, these precious manifestations of sound architecture vie with one another for inventiveness.
The motet was very fashionable in the 13th century and skilfully played with musical discourse and dialectic art. It superimposed and intertwined different texts and languages, bloating, gasping, rambling, mocking or praising at will.
The recent pieces of the programme share this spirit, this taste for experimentation and the extraordinary. They use language in a virtuoso and musical manner.
Poetry gets mingled with it, entangling and untangling, giving the chatterboxes a voice. Chatter, glibness, cackle and eloquence!

Participative creation

Voices, instruments, circus, video, amateur and smartphone choruses

Cultural actions for amateur choruses (adults & children)

The hypnotic music of Steve Reich has a dialogue with that of Pérotin, Pink Floyd and Stockhausen. The public is in the heart of the creation of Jonathan Bell which encloses this show.

Singers : Laurence Brisset, Eugénie De Mey, Marie-George Monet, Estelle Nadau, Hélène Richer, Caroline Tarrit,
Percussions : Stan Delannoy, Vincent Martin – claviers : Laurent Durupt, Trami Nguyen  Musical direction : Rémi Durupt
Circus perfomer : Julien Cramillet – visual artist : Hicham Berrada  – staging : Lionel Parlier Computer music design : Jonathan Bell – Sound engineer : Pierre Favrez

Duration : 1h20

CONSTELLATIONS traces out a poetic and oneiric path between dramatic expression and a wide variety of musical styles: a resonant and visual constellation of suns, suspended and evocative like a lunar image in a dreamlike moment.

CONSTELLATIONS is a story of encounters: initially between the Links and De Caelis ensembles, then between Pérotin’s Ars Antiqua music and that of Steve Reich, to create a spellbinding and original work incorporating music, circus and video.

Bringing together musicians and visual artists, the Links Ensemble has set itself the task of inventing new, often participative concert formats. In their desire to encourage amateur choruses to perform contemporary music and make it more fun and more accessible, it was only natural for Links to come together with the De Caelis Ensemble, a specialist in medieval music and contemporary creation.

The two ensembles will be presenting Proverb by Steve Reich, with forays into Pink Floyd and Stockhausen. There will also be modal improvisations inspired by Pérotin’s Organa and Jonathan Bell’s piece Le temps des Nuages, composed for the two ensembles and an amateur chorus to a text by Michel Onfray. Taken from his book Recours aux forêts, published by editons Galilée, it is a poetic and philosophical meditation on the need to set one’s destiny in nature and the cosmos.

Pérotin’s music dazzled the West by its inventiveness. The use of rhythmic forms, numerous repetitions and imitations, gives it a stimulatingly exhilarating, quasi-hypnotic quality. Clearly,  a fertile source of inspiration for Steve Reich.

At IRCAM, Jonathan Bell has developed a process that allows an amateur chorus to receive musical instructions via a mobile telephone, thus gaining access to the creative process without the often formidable barrier of score reading.

Specifically created for the performance, the chorus is dispersed among the audience. The spatialised sound leaves the listener immersed in a unique experience.

To lend image and substance to the musical programme, the artists’ collective  has devised a world in motion. An ethereal universe comprised of fascinatingly spectacular poetic colours and forms that bring together the aerial  choreographies of Circus performer Julien Cramillet and the chemo-hypnotic videos of visual artist Hicham Berrada created in real time on stage. CONSTELLATIONS will explore all the theatre’s public areas to offer an astonishing sensorial adventure that has to be felt and experienced in total immersion.

For five female singers, amateur chorus and electronic soundtrack.

Smartvox of Jonathan Bell, concert – performance ().

French pieces of the Notre-Dame School of Paris (XIIth et XIIIrd centuries)

A melting pot where get involved sacred texts from the Bible, contemporary music, new technology and early music. In a hyper connected world, Jonathan Bell takes an artistic look by puting the alive, the sensitive at the heart of the human-machine relation.

Duration : 1h20

A cutting-edge technology for musical creation. Jonathan Bell invented a transmission tool allowing for the orchestration of numerous human and electronic sources. The performers, five vocal soloists and an amateur choir, use their smartphones and headphones all connected through wifi, in order to participate together to the elaboration of the same piece. He thus conceive a human-machine dialogue, as well as a machine-mediated dialogue between humans, both a technical and poetic achievement. Each performer is provided with auditory cues: pitches, rhythm and text. The composer therefore finds an affinity with the musical practice of Middle Ages, in which hearing was of greater importance than sight.

In his musical writing, Jonathan Bell carries the influence of the French spectral school. The harmony is generated from the analysis of sound spectra, and uses a mixture of natural voices and synthesised sounds. The choir rehearses the piece with the De Caelis ensemble, and can therefore fully join the performance during the concert .

An ancient part fulfills the program: pieces of the 12th and 13th Century, monodies and polyphonies of the Ars Antigua. This innovative art of unprecedented beauty found imitations throughout Europe, and so was later called École de Notre-Dame de Paris, with anonymous masters as well as Pérotin and Léonin.

The Smartvox project allows unexperimented music readers to participate to musical materials hitherto reserved to experts. Our ambition is to discover this music from the inside, through experimentation. Smartphones give here autonomy to each singer, and allows them to tune and keep in time with each other, even in complex microtonal or polyrhythmic passages. The setup allows here professional singers to convey their knowledge and passion through a direct interaction with singers of all levels, immersed in an unknown soundworld.

This process also permits new forms of concerts and music making. The listener is immersed in a mobile sonic architecture. A choreography of slow movements, also guided by the smartphones’ screens, will evoke at times forms of rituals. Some light projections will also underline the movements of the choir, thus adding to the visual dimension of the concert.

En partenariat avec l’IRCAM.

Jonathan Bell était sur France Musique l’invité de l’émission Le Cri du Patchwork de Clément Lebrun du 27 février 2018 pour expliquer son travail avec l’ensemble De Caelis et présenter son système Smartvox.
Retrouver l’entretien de Jonathan Bell dans la deuxième partie de l’émission :

An exceptional program between sacred and profane that pays tribute to two great female figures of history: Eleanor of Brittany and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

For 5 unaccompanied women’s voices

Duration: 1h15

Program premiere : 26th of September of 2015 in the Royale Abbey of Fontevraud

Monophonic and polyphonic parts of the Gradual of Eleanor of Brittany (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) precedes “The song of William of Aquitaine”, piece of the composer Philippe Hersant, inspired by a poem by William IX, grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine (ordered by the Fontevraud Abbey).

In this program they are from the Gradual songs from the Mass for the Vigil of the Assumption, sequences and two polyphony, improvised polyphony as it was in then. Joined the program three pieces of English origin that could have been sung in fondations from Fontevraud in England, as Amesbury where Eleanor of Brittany was born in 1275. Gradual of Eleanor of Brittany is exceptional. Richly illuminated, it consists 301 sheets. After a stay at the English convent of Amesbury, Eleanor of Brittany arrives at Fontevraud in 1290 and pronounced her vows there. She becomes the sixteenth abbess in 1304 and at his death in 1342, she bequeathed the Gradual with her coat of arms. This is a unique source for the study of the practice of Gregorian chant in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In 2013, Xavier Kawa Topor and Françoise Baudin, directors of the Fontevraud Abbey – Cultural Encounter Centre, ask Oulipo poets to imagine that read Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 2013, a book is published that opens with an enigmatic poem written by William IX, first troubadour and grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Farai a verse from dreit nien, that is to say “I make a nothingness pure singing. ” It is this text that Philippe Hersant chose to set to music. Two songs of troubadours held him company, one of Guiraud Riquier (1254- 1292), one of Guirault Bornelh (1162 to 1199).

Ecoutez l’émission de France Culture “Continents Musique” avec l’ensemble De Caelis sur Le livre d’Aliénor et la thématique “Les femmes, le pouvoir et la musique”

From secret to sacred between yesterday and today.

Hildegard Von Bingen (1098 – 1179) / Zad Moultaka (1967-)

Hildegard’s ecstatic song stimulates the language of today. Zad Moultaka inlays the very depths of his cultural inheritance with flashes of light, diamonds, mortar fire and passages of sound-bearing light. Linking these pieces together, crossing the layers of memory and of time as one crosses walls, he cuts a path into our imaginations.

Hildegard von Bigen, Symphonia harmoniae celestium revelationum (XIIth century).
Zad Moultaka, Ubi es, for 5 female voices, electronics and a bass drum (2014).
Programme for 5 unaccompanied female voices, electronics and a bass drum.

Duration : 1h15

A co-production between De Caelis and the Festival de Saintes.
This programme has benn recorded and edited by L’empreinte Digitale.
GEMME ED13241 © L’empreinte digitale 2015
www.empreintedigitale-label.fr

English music of the 13th and 14th centuries

Programme for five unaccompanied female voices 

Duration : 1h

The English Channel has always been a link between France and England just as much as it has separated them. Love and hate were constantly at war in the hearts of those who dwelt on those shores. After the Norman conquest — or invasion, depending on the point of view taken — of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, the lands beyond the Channel became French-speaking and continental in culture. From that time onwards Norman French was spoken by the intellectual and social upper class; it remained the language of breeding and of culture until the end of the Hundred Years’ War.

This programme demonstrates the great variety of musical genres used during the 14th century by English musicians. Apart from the two large manuscripts of St. Andrews (1230) and Old Hall (1415), there are only fragmentary sources remaining of other works composed in the British Isles during that period; nonetheless, these two large manuscripts give a very clear picture of the musical culture of almost two centuries.

Musical styles travelled rapidly during the 13th century and Parisian polyphony of the Gothic period, otherwise known as the school of Notre-Dame, swiftly became established in England. The Parisian style and its techniques were pushed to their limits, this taking place well after organum and the conductus had been abandoned elsewhere. Hybrid genres such as the conductus motet and the trope motet were created. The blending of all these genres as well as the frequent use of canonic imitation, of passages vocalised on one syllable, of the inversion of voices with or without text, of the possibility of using the cantus firmus in the middle voice, and of homophonic technique were all characteristic of the English style of composition. We should also add to this their taste for intervals of thirds and sixths and, of course, the addition of texts in Norman French to works originally set to Latin or French texts.

This programme is made up of motets and conductus from English manuscripts dating from the 13th and 14th centuries.

A concert with narrations for people of all ages and tastes

Programme for five female voices and organetto

Duration : 1h

The Ensemble De Caelis presents a programme for people of all ages and tastes, a lively and original way to discover the Middle Ages through their music. Why was this period called ‘middle’? What happened then? What music did Charlemagne listen to, what was Richard the Lionheart singing when he returned from the Crusades, what tunes did Heloise hum gently to Abelard, what songs lifted the pious souls of St. Louis during Mass and of Joan of Arc and du Guesclin before their respective battles, which songs gladdened the hearts of the goliards, of Robin and Maid Marion, of all the minstrels, troubadours and trouvères of every region of France, of every happy or unhappy lover? We will attempt to show you some of the musical riches of this astonishing period of history and to explain a few things that will let you appreciate them even more. This is an entire section of our artistic heritage just waiting to be rediscovered — and all you need to bring is your curiosity; you won’t believe your ears!